This song has taken a while to finalize the arrangement. It is only part of the song it started out as. Diced, sliced, edited and rewritten, I hope this first mix sounds like it belongs! Sometimes you are guided.

On-street-parking. I know I will get a lot of kick-back for this one but I think we should end on-street-parking. Even in residential and business districts. Safety issues, snow clearance, traffic flow, and maintenance costs come to mind immediately. I know many areas do not have much parking space for residents and there are more multiple car families than in the past. Businesses also benefit if customers can park right in front of their stores. But I am not sure this is worth blocking local traffic including emergency vehicles, utility companies, snow plows and the like in areas easily affected by weather, accidents, building fires and a host of other challenges.

Still, if we are planning a city or community, let’s plan on eliminating this practice entirely. Just think how much this would ease congestion, improve safety, reduce city road maintenance costs, allow for emergency vehicles and unexpected weather or unusual events and improve the look and health of our streets and neighborhoods.

Let me know what you think. What would you suggest to your city planners?

Here are two little things that bug me about traffic patterns and planning. Maybe it is just me, but if I am driving in residential or even business areas where there are a lot of intersections, I think it is weird and dangerous when you come to an intersection but the traffic coming from a dead-end street does not have to stop. This seems to happen a lot where a main road ends in cul de sacs where the “dead-end” is only one block long. Not much traffic comes from there and it is easy to miss the fact that on-coming traffic has no stop sign.

The second minor thing is when you have multiple lanes of road or entry ramps to a highway where the lanes merge and signs say the left lane ends! Again this does not make logical sense. Merging traffic in the US comes in from the right lane the vast majority of the time. The right lane is the slow or merge/exit lane. Faster traffic is encouraged to use the left lanes, implying they have priority. Why tell a priority lane that the lane ends…… merge into the right lane……. and sometimes when you reach the end of the entry ramp you have to merge left again? These little things just bug me from time to time.

I like to drive around cities and country sides. It becomes obvious after a bit of traveling that some cities are better planned and have more logical systems in place than others. I would love to have the ear of some city planners because it is clear they do not PLAN for growth and other transportation needs early enough. I would like to share some of my thoughts with you, and hopefully you will share yours here as well. Who knows, maybe we can get the attention of a few city planners while we are it!

One thing I would really like to see changed is the location of many schools. I know there are good reasons, but all too often they are located on the main strip through towns of all sizes. I thought about posting pictures as examples, but we have all seen them. My guess is this makes the land rather expensive for all tax payers. Or to look at it another way, the land is of commercial value and interest to local businesses. A number of businesses could pay fair price for the prime locations and exposure the real estate could provide and that would translate to higher tax collected and business success in the area.

Now consider if the schools would be located a few blocks away from “the main drag” going through town. Your children will be safer crossing the streets and playing in the area due to reduced traffic around the school. People that are not supposed to be there would be more obvious if they are loitering around the area. This would reduce risk to students.

Now that the school is not on the main road, traffic flow will be improved by not restricting speeds in school zones, reducing congestion in parts of town most people will have to travel through daily or at least quite often. I understand this might mean a loss of revenue by reducing speeding violations through school zones, but I think we can live with that!

What do you think? Do you see more reasons to adopt this policy? Do you think there are reasons or situations where this would not be beneficial?

Let me know what bothers you about travel through your city and in other locations. Who knows, maybe we can suggest changes that will help a lot of people.

Part of the challenge in writing songs is how difficult it might be to convey a particular feeling or message to studio musicians. All players should be heading in the same direction, playing the same tune, moving at the same tempo and so on. Creating soundscapes must be a lot like painting. Drawing the lines and forms are one thing, but which color is best? There are so many available yet each one conveys a unique mood or feeling. Sounds can be like that. We asked a guitar player/friend of ours to come up with guitar tracks for a project I was working on. This was for a cable TV project looking for sound tracks for an automotive enthusiast series. We wanted to give the guitar parts a bit of mood setting so we asked him to create tracks that would generate the feeling of …

an engine or racing car, crunchy, powerful

drive – movement – acceleration, fast, fluid

Using basically no more than the above “instructions” he gathered toys and used the word imagery to shape the sound and the playing style for these tracks. We used the same list to come up with the basic tracks for the song. This song is an adaptation of a song I wrote a long time ago and we called it The Big D Jam. I originally composed this song using the Arp Odyssey synthesizer. I programmed a pretty cool sounding bass patch and came up with the bass line and skeleton of the song. This song in its original version was performed when I was with The Personal Touch years ago. If it was a rockin’ crowd we would let Ric Ahlers jam a bit on the solo parts. I put some simple lyrics to it and it was a really fun song to play out. Recently I pulled it out of the song closet and re-wrote the chorus. I also used new software plug-ins from my computer for all the sounds. This was amazing for me because I have all this fancy gear with cool sounds and I am not using them at all. In this post, I wanted to give you an idea how the song progressed. The new sounds are just amazingly clear and natural. I will post in the near future the complete mix with vocals and effects. When the sounds and the performance match the request or target, the song seems like it was made to order.

I have been planning to pull out songs I wrote years ago that have never been recorded before (other than live jams in living room sessions…) and record them. I have been doing a bit of that lately and here is a song I posted the lyrics to earlier called “The Wrong Reply”

For a number of these songs it is difficult for me to imagine hearing the songs in any other way than with acoustic guitars and vocalists. I often think of harmonies, but adding instrumentation really opens up the choices of how the song is transformed. Many people are not aware that the popular Jimi Hendrix song, “All Along The Watch Tower”, was written by Bob Dylan! If you listen to both versions you can see how much the instrumentation and interpretation of the song can change it dramatically. There are many other examples, of course, but this is a good one as I appreciate both artists. This also demonstrates the power of doing a ‘cover tune’ someone else wrote, but that is a subject for a different article.

As with many of my recordings I play all the instruments – sometimes performing in the studio and sometimes using sounds stored on my computer. The drums are usually triggered sounds using MIDI controllers (like my keyboard or drum pads). Sometimes I will use drum loops that are pre-recorded drum patterns that you can pick and choose to match your song. My songs usually have a twist or odd groove to them and do not always lend themselves well to existing drum beats. I wanted something other than the standard drum kit sounds for this song and used other familiar percussion instruments. The bass guitar is recorded using the keyboard as MIDI triggers.

I made up the instrumental part as I forgot what I usually play there and may add a solo instrument of kind in the future.

I may have some free time for a little bit and I would like to catch up on a bunch of things that have been on the back-burner for a while. I also hope to pull up old band and other video projects and push them hard into the hi-def age. It will be a lot harder than it sounds as some of my media is very old tech. We shall see.

I also wanted to share with you some of the songs my older brother David did in a studio years ago. I was not involved in writing or recording these songs. My home studio was meager by today’s standards and I was only set up for one-man songwriting stuff. I was not able to record an entire band at one time back then.

My brother’s band was doing some original songs and jamming pretty often. Tom Collins and David had an inspired writing session for a couple of hours before practice. The band mates were so excited with the new material they made calls and booked time in a recording studio the next week!!##!!

I will detail the studio experience and give the band members and authors their due in future blogs. Here is a tune from the Studio Ways session that will kick things off well. “My Dog Loves You Too” is a heart-warming love song with a pleasant twist of humor. David was faced with a challenge to write a funny love song. His ex-wife Cynthia came up with a few guitar parts and the song writing took off! Like this one, all the songs were literally finished and arranged in the studio the day they were recorded. It gives a great live feel to the collection. Tom Collins wrote most of the music for this recording and my brother wrote the lyrics.